The Bookslut Travel-writes Dangerously

I apologize. Once again, I ask you to work for a reblog. But I think this one is worth it. It’s a short piece, but manages to cover a lot of ground without feeling dense. If you like any of the things I usually write about here, you’ll probably find something to like in this post on the Bookslut Blog.

In it, Jessa Crispin, aka the Bookslut, writes about ballet and travel – two things I love. She touches on male dancers, trust, and applause, and includes a gorgeous image that evokes all of these things while drawing on deep myth and (my) childhood memories of C.S. Lewis. I profoundly disagree with her preference for other dance forms over ballet while heartily agreeing with her observations about the nature of ballet. But mostly I share this piece because of the wisdom in her opening sentences.

2018 Update

I’m embedding the original article here. That’s because, as I go through old posts and try to update links and formatting, I’m finding that a lot of things have disappeared from the internet. This Bookslut post is still up at this link: http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2014_05.php#020668 

but the website is no longer adding new material, and one never knows when it might disappear. I haven’t asked for permission to reprint this, so I will apologize in advance. Please click through to the link while it still works, just in case, even though there are no ads on that site. But if that page disappears, here is the post I’m talking about.

The Post

You take a risk, when you write about travel, about mixing things up. About experiencing something new and saying, look, this is how they do things here, isn’t that weird, when in fact it’s just a weird thing that happened once here and then never again. You can mistake coincidence for characteristic.

But it’s happened in front of me four times, all right? So it has to be a thing.

I’ve been going to a lot of dance performances here in Budapest. I used to want to be a dancer, and was deeply serious about it as a child, so I will go see just about any dance performance when I’m traveling. I’m less likely to go see ballet, although that was and remains my dance practice of choice. But I think I chose ballet because I am secretly a masochist, not for any aesthetic value. Ballet, classical ballet, I find so dull, as I’m uninterested in ballerinas. It’s the fragility, the otherworldliness, I get bored. I know how difficult it is to do what the ballerinas are doing, and I know the deformity of the body it causes, but maybe that’s why I can’t appreciate it. I can’t think, oh, how gracefully she floats, I think about her big toenail coming off, I think about the way your bones throw off spurs from the pressure, I think about the discipline and the pain. It’s hard to see past that and see grace.

I go to see dance to see the men. Men are frequently not given much to do in classical ballet. Here, I will present the woman, I will lift her up, maybe I can get in a few nice leaps across the stage before the girl squad comes in prancing. But when I was a kid, I had a Baryshnikov VHS tape when I was a kid, I kind of imprinted on male dancers, or maybe just on him, that contradiction of strength and fragility, grace and brutality. One doesn’t want to see that reigned in with something like La Syphilde. One wants it to fucking go.

So I bought tickets to pretty much every performance during a dance festival I could find where male dancers were on the promotional posters. And there was this night, at a contemporary filtered through Hungarian folk dance performance, that took my breath away. Folk dance does not deny that you are a body, or try to disguise that the way ballet does. Ballet always seemed like an attempt to transcend the body, somehow expressing divinity. But sometimes you need mud and flesh.

And oh, men are wonderful, aren’t they? The strength and the power when it is combined with that openness, the way they would power themselves across the stage and then drop to the floor, their chests pulsating with their heavy breaths and their racing hearts, like the breasts of frightened birds. And the way they were there for the women, and the bravery of those women. The women fell face first, they were caught. They flew across the stage, they were caught. The women dropped from heights without hesitation or fear and why would they, they knew they would be caught.

But then the Budapest thing, the thing I will claim is a Budapest thing, because it happened all four nights. And the nights when I was here before. The audiences of Budapest do not applaud like um normal people do. It is scattered at first and then they clap in time with each other. Until it becomes a thunderous beat, everyone at the same tempo. Not in an “encore” kind of way, this is during regular curtain call. Everyone finds a common beat, and it slowly increases in speed, until suddenly the clapping halves its speed and everyone complies and slows down, and then the tempo increases until it drops back again, a rise and fall. And you can stomp your feet along with it, or you can think I am just going to clap like a normal person, this is madness, but it’s infectious, you soon match your clapping to the audience’s.

It has a word, vastaps, the Iron Clap. Why is this a thing? What does it say about the culture? Who knows.

I do wish there were better writing about dance. I read a theory that the reason good dance and good writing doesn’t coincide because there is something about a person who needs an audience there as they perform, they can’t sustain a long writing spree, off in a room for so long by themselves. I suppose that is why actors are also such terrible writers. (For the most part.) But Nijinsky, and his loony diary, will always have my love. Nijinsky and his beautiful thighs.

And for more men, there’s always our Masculinity issue, which includes writing by Friend of Nijinsky, Leon Bakst. I thought about the men in that issue as I was watching the dance, the strength, the power, the openness. It made me dizzy for the love of men.

Did you find anything interesting? Which part?